Nvidia unveils plans for new state-of-the-art Silicon Valley campus

Nvidia has offered up more details about the new, state-of-the-art campus it plans to build across the street from its current headquarters in Santa Clara, California.

The graphics chip maker filed plans for the development project with the city of Santa Clara last week, and officially notified investors in an SEC filing a day later that it would be building new headquarters on Silicon Valley property the company has owned since 2009.

"Our three-person startup has grown to 8,000 staff across 40-plus sites. And our headquarters in Santa Clara, just a few blocks from where we started, barely has a spare desk. We're absolutely bursting at the seams," Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang wrote on the company's official blog, detailing the growth of the company since its founding 20 years ago.

"So, we've decided to build a new campus right across the street, one as distinctive as our company," he continued. "The new Nvidia building will capture the ambition and imagination of our people. It will stand at the intersection of science and art, just as our work in visual computing does. It will be the symbol, the physical manifestation, of our vision for the company."

Nvidia posted conceptual street and aerial views (aerial view pictured, top) of two six-sided, nearly 500,000-square-foot office buildings it plans to build on the 25-acre, company-owned San Tomas Office Park property across the street from its current headquarters.

The company declined to state a budget for the project, but said in the SEC filing that it planned to break ground on the first of the two main buildings in 2013 and estimated that capital funding for the new campus would ramp in the third quarter of this year.

The Silicon Valley Business Journal, which first reported the project filing last week, described the buildings as having a "sloped glass curtain wall on each side ris[ing] to a curvaceous, geodesic roof."

Huang confirmed that architecture firm M. Arthur Gensler Jr. & Associates would be designing its new campus and named Harvard-trained Hao Ko as the lead architect. The earlier filing with the city of Santa Clara listed San Mateo-based Sares Regis Group as the project developer, and also named engineering firm Kier & Wright and landscape architects Tom Leader Studio as project participants.

The Nvidia CEO said the design of the main campus buildings tied into the company's core technological mission.

"The design harmonises smart functionality and a shape that connects with and inspires our employees — a triangle, the fundamental building block of computer graphics. Efficient in every way, the design is thoughtful in its use of space, energy, and environment, and, of course, cost," he said.

"Its vast open floors will facilitate our cross-functional work," he continued. "The nature of building our products requires experts from multiple disciplines to come together, and this building is designed above all for collaboration."

Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley Business Journal reported that Nvidia's plans also reference a future development phase that "could add up to 767,500 square feet of additional office space at the intersection of Condensa Street and the San Tomas Aquino Creek Trail."